If the name Rafael Lozano-Hemmer doesn't mean anything to you now, it will come November. The fastest rising art star is set to create one of the most spellbinding installations yet in Trafalgar Square. Called Under Scan, the giant video work features a cast of silhouettes who jump up and dance as your shadow passes across their periphery.

Born in 1967, the Mexican-born, Canadian-based Lozano-Hemmer is often described as an electronic artist (a name he loathes, preferring to describe his maverick works as "anti-monuments for alien agency"). Using robotics, projections, internet links, mobile phone interfaces and ultrasonic sensors, he builds complex constructions that screw with the system. Like mad professors, Lozano-Hemmer and his seven assistants build doppelgangers and conjure ghosts that haunt his eager public.

Yet there is more than spectacle to the artist's creations. In a world of advance surveillance systems that continuously track our every move, Lozano-Hemmer's digital marvels are retaliation against all that prying.

His current exhibition at The Curve, Barbican, uses the audience's bodies to tune into different radio frequencies, cutting from air traffic control to the police to Magic FM in the space of a slouch. A self-confessed nerd, it is not surprising that Lozano-Hemmer trained in physical chemistry rather than art, and it has only been in the past four years that museums have started collecting his work. From his early installation Surface Tension, in which a giant eye followed viewers round a room, to the recent Subtitled Public in which audiences were tracked by infrared devices, Lozano-Hemmer is like an anarchic whistle-blower exposing the sophisticated devices used to control us.

Corporate speak: When asked about the conglomerates that he often needs to bank roll his big budget productions he modestly declared, "We have a saying in Mexico: 'to bite your poncho'. I don't go in begging for £50,000, I go in defending the passionate uselessness of my work."

Tripping the light fantastic: He is credited with devising the world's largest light show when he invited hundreds of participants to direct search lights over Mexico City.

Treading the boards: He used to be in a theatre troupe called PoMo CoMo, the productions of which he described as chaotic, "like the dressing on a pizza".